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Are robots the future of food delivery?

Thursday, 01 December 2022 12:03 AM [ Last Update: Thursday, 01 December 2022 12:32 AM ]

It's an unseasonably-warm, late-November day on the University of Illinois at Chicago, or UIC, campus. Sprinkled in amongst the students walking along the school's sidewalks are fully-automated robots rolling around on six wheels carrying food meant for a hungry scholar.

It's really kind of exciting, I mean, who would have thought just, you know, ten, 20 years ago that, you know, food could be delivered by a robot," said Chip Comery, area operations lead at Starship Technologies.

"Anybody can download the app just like DoorDash or GrubHub, and they can place a pin on campus and order from whatever restaurant is available. That restaurant will then fulfill the order, load the robot and the robot will be off to you, fully autonomously.

Comery says Starship Technologies has robots just like the ones at UIC on roughly 30 US college campuses, as well as various locations in the UK, Germany, Denmark, Finland and Estonia, where the company's currently headquartered.

Around the world. We have almost 2000 robots now," said Comery. "We've just completed our 4,000,000th delivery worldwide a few weeks back. Despite their global success, Starship's fleet of fully-automated delivery robots do have their skeptics on UIC's campus.

Although they agree on many things, Ryan's friend and fellow UIC senior, Bella Vrapciu says she's a fan of the food delivery bots.

I'm lazy so I don't want to go and get my own food," said Vrapciu. "If someone can bring it to me, that be nice. But I don't like, like sometimes, you have to deal with people, like the Uber eats driver. It's nice it's just a robot.

(Source: Reuters)

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